In general, chaos theory is considered to refer to the
economy between order and chance, determinism
and unpredictability, clarity and aporia. However, from an epistemological and a
critical point of view,
it might be interesting to assess the local and global perspectives rooted into
the interdisciplinary body
of chaos theory. Such an assessment is meaningful not only in understanding the
various claims about
the validity of chaos in different scientific fields, but also in clarifying the
cultural and political context
of chaos theory. The latter is what Hayles in the Chaos Bound (1990) calls the
"politics of chaos."

The common direct way to distinguish between “local” and
“global” character of knowledge (either
scientific or experiential) sets the stage to the range of applicability and the
domain of methodology
involved in the discourse into which this knowledge is embodied. Of course, such
an approach is not
only
sensitive but also pertinent to the adopted organization and articulation of the
examined body of
knowledge; for example, the opposing presuppositions of social constructivism
and positivist realism
might
imply different characterizations of local/global. Nevertheless, from the
standpoint of an external
observer, the local or global attribute hinges upon the degree of “visibility”
of the way different pieces
of
knowledge are related to each other. Apparently, this is a question of
identifying differences and coarse
graining similarities, which necessitates the construction of a virtual space of
all possible and contingent
configurations of knowledge. Although analogies, shifts, and other transfers
between separate theories
quite often occur (usually at the initial level of the intuitive theoretical
formation), they can generically
smoothly be appropriated into the internal structure of a knowledge. At least,
this is what happens at the
regime of a normal science, i.e., far from the uprising conditions of scientific
revolutions, when the
interior
coherence of a theory is maintained by her epistemological autonomy (Kuhn, 1962).

External strains between theories can develop as a result of
a variety of reasons. Some of them
may reflect an intrinsic tendency towards a theoretical expansion, in some cases
due to the high
generality or abstract potentiality of the assumed means of analysis. Others may
simply have socio-
political or cultural connotations, and correspond to existing tensions at the
social level. In this respect,
as a rule, the social controversies are the ones to be induced onto the
scientific ground: questions of
power are often at the heart of certain theoretical disputes. Even if this fails
to be true some times, more
often it can be seen on the way and the conditions under which the theoretical
antagonisms are usually
committed.

Under the action of such a multiplicity of internal and
external determinations, the resulting
local or global characterizations are quite intricate. Although it is not one of
the most crucial
epistemological questions, subsuming a theory to the label of either locality or
globality sometimes
turns out to be something more than a conforming convenience; it becomes a
matter of belief, which is
a rather political and questionably scientific attitude. This culpable ambiguity
may penetrate even at the
level of methodology. In this way, one may wonder whether scientific
reductionism might be
considered as a local interpretation disguising a global disposition, and
whether scientific holism might
be considered as a global settlement assembling a local inducement.

The fact is that chaos theory is undoubtedly establishing a
mainstream paradigm to many
scientific fields. What remains to be seen, and it is still at stake, is
whether this is a paradigm shift. On
the one side, chaos is providing a source of methodological intuition for those
working in a variety of
disciplines. On the other side, the interdisciplinarity institutions do possess
the tools to articulate a
novel arrangement over an existing body of a scientific field. However, these
events are often
misunderstood; the way to conceive the resulting rearrangement is not by
employing a simplistic
appendage of a predefined condition of knowing in order to organize the body of
some knowledge. In
other words, chaos being a paradigm neither means that chaos is just an
instrument of knowledge nor
that a paradigm is just an interchangeable or scalable passive theoretical
formation. In this sense, those
globalizing claims for chaos need to be reconsidered.

In fact, Gleick's popular book, Chaos (1987), has fueled an abundant pool
of statements claiming the globalizing value of chaos theory. For example,
Gleick says: "Chaos breaks
across the lines that separate scientific disciplines. Because it is a science
of the global nature of
systems, it has brought together thinkers from fields that had been widely
separated. ... It makes strong
claims about the universal behavior of complexity. ... They (chaos theorists)
believe that they are
looking for the whole" (p. 5).

Contrary to these rather absolute claims and though there are
a lot of opposite arguments
carrying the case for locality, the local/global constitution of chaos theory
raises many delicate
questions. Both in practice and in theory, for example, the occurrence of a
chaotic behavior results from
the nonlinear interactions between different parts of the system. Therefore, it
is a local coordination
subordinating the global flow of the dynamics in a strange way, ie, extremely
sensitive to fluctuations
and thus completely unpredictable. However, one has to suspect this argument,
when one realizes that a
lot of chaotic systems reveal a universal character of transition in their
processes. Taking into account
the previously discussed precaution to respect the relative autonomy of
scientific disciplines, this almost
ubiquitously emerging globalization in chaos should not pass unexplored.

In any case, the problematic relation between local and
global in chaos theory is part of a
wide-ranging debate about local and global in contemporary thought. Hayles in
the Chaos Bound (1990) remarks some astonishing similarities between the
sciences of chaos and
critical theory. According to her, "In the new scientific paradigms, the global
subsumes the local, but at
the price of reconceptualizing the global as constituted by locality. Within
critical theory, the claims of
the local are expanded until the local itself becomes a new kind of globalizing
imperative. These two
impulses mirror each other, for in the sciences of chaos the global is
localized, and in critical theory the
local is globalized" (p. 213-4).

Actually, Hayles' concern (in the last chapter of her book,
the Chaos Bound) was to confront
critically and refute the assumptions that local knowledge is progressive,
politically libertarian, while
global theory is oppressive, politically totalitarian. Such a political
connotation of the local/global
scheme has been quite popular among some critical theorists. For example,
particularly important are
Foucault's (1970) archaeological analyses of the totalizing
theories of the
Enlightenment, from grammar to biology, and to penology, and their association
with totalitarian
political practices. Now, by considering an intermingle between local and
global, Hayles argues that "it is wrong to assume that global theory is
always politically
more coercive than local knowledge" (p. 214). But she realizes that such a
balance between local and
global is extremely paradoxical, "for to answer it one must put forward
generalizations, yet
generalizations are precisely what are at issue" (p. 214).

However, behind the political connotations of the
local/global dialectic, there are certain
ontological presuppositions favoring or disregarding the adoption of the local
or global perspective. It
is not evident to a majority of contemporary theorists that the social and
historical construction of
reality necessitates a tendency toward generalization, essentialization,
unification, and universalization.
Two opposite proponents are Rorty (1989) and Smith (1988),
both of whom maintaining that all values are radically contingent on social,
economical, institutional,
and ideological contexts; Rorty by means of an antirepresentationalist
neopragmatism and Smith by a
fecund axiological relativism.

Sometimes the valorization of local knowledge appears in
extreme tones. Such might be
considered the critisisms of Lyotard, who, according to Argyros (1991), even
proceeds that far as to "define the urge towards globalization as terrorism" (p.
213). In the concluding
chapter of his Postmodern Condition (1984), Lyotard foresees
that the coming of
the information societies will strengthen the power of the ruling elites having
access to the information
resources. He thinks that this totalitarian danger can be confronted by the
emergence and development
within natural and mathematical sciences of such theories as fractal geometry,
quantum mechanics,
catastrophe theory, and Godel's theorem. Grouping them under the label
"paralogy," Lyotard suggests
that they will let us "wage a war on totality; let us be witnesses to the
unpresentable; let us activate the
differences and save the honor of the name" (p. 82).

Although Lyotard's arguments express a contemporary popular
allergy toward globalization,
his paralogies are rather biased and hardly convincing. Their problem, as Hayles
(1990) has remarked, is that they are confusing scientific
theories with social
problems (a kind of a social Darwinism) and that they all, despite of their
local endorsement,
encompass a redifined global quality. However, one might agree with Argyros'
conclusion that at least
one of Lyotard's themes merits special attention; this is, according to Argyros
(1991), "the question of whether the meaningfulness and pragmatic
usefulness of
language games, by which Lyotard means semiotic exchanges in general, are best
described as local or
global phenomena" (p. 234).

What also seems to be very interesting is to compare and
contrast Lyotard's emphasis on
agonistics ("catastrophic antagonism is literally the rule" p. 59) with Prigogine's
view about a cooperative and communicative behavior far from equilibrium. In
their book Order Out of
Chaos (1984) Prigogine and Stengers formulate this view in
discussing the
molecular basis of nonlinear chemical reactions: "At equilibrium molecules
behave as essentially
independent entities; they ignore one another. We would like to call them
"hypnons," "sleepwalkers." ...
However, nonequilibrium wakes them up and introduces a coherence quite foreign
to equilibrium" (p.
180-81).

Thus, Prigogine's synergetic dialectic overcomes Lyotard's
antagonistical paralogies aiming to
the possibility of renewing man's relation to nature. As Argyros (1991) sees it,
"Prigogine's version of postmodern science is not the cultivation of
discontinuity and paradox, but a
new dialogue with the natural world that respects both its otherness and our
fundamental continuity with
it" (p. 235). Such an outcome being optimistic, there is a pessimistic one too:
"This leads both to hope
and a threat: hope, since even small fluctuations may grow and change the
overall structure. As a result,
individual activity is not doomed to insignificance. On the other hand, this is
also a threat, since in our
universe the security of stable, permanent rules seems gone forever" (Prigogine
and Stengers, 1984, p. 313). Prigogine's call to an ethical responsibility
represents a brave
uncompromised thesis in front of a changing chaotic universe.

Underlying the Prigogine/Lyotard contrast, there is a tangled
relation between the nonlinear
science of chaos and the postmodern discourse of deconstruction. First of all,
there is a striking
parallelism between chaos and deconstruction in a number of ways. For example,
the initial focus of
Derrida's work (1976, 1978) was the
deconstuction of
the Saussurian sign; this was an effort to establish a nonlinear relation
between signifier and signified,
or between sign and referent, and to affirm the destabilizing effects of
undecidability. Another common
characteristic refers to the openness and infinite dissemination of texts, which
thus become susceptible
to endless iterations; as a result, the boundaries inside and between text and
context are not fixed so that
infinite texts and contexts may permeate other texts and contexts. According to
Hayles, "both
discourses invert traditional priorities: chaos is deemed more fecund than
order, uncertainty is
privileged above predictability, and fragmentation is seen as the reality that
arbitrary definitions of
closure would deny" (Hayles, 1989, p. 314). The reason that
the two theories
seem to be perfectly congruent is, again according to Hayles, "not because they
are derived from a
common source or because they influenced each other, but because their central
ideas form an
interconnected network, each part of which leads to every other part" (Hayles,
1990, p. 184).

Nevertheless, there are many severe differences between
deconstruction and chaos. Following
Hayles (1989, 1990), let us discuss a
few. Chaos is a
mathematical theory dealing with concepts exactly defined, numerically
computable and, up to some
degree, subject to a series of proven theorems and other results; deconstruction
is concerned with
language and textual entities, which are hardly subject to formalization. One
measure of these
differences is the disagreement on how extensive chaos is: for Derrida, textual
chaos is almost
omnipresent, but, in chaos theories, islands of orderness are commonly
acknowledged in oceans of
randomness (or the other way). Moreover, while chaos often considers a
transition from orderness to
randomness, deconstruction sees an apocalyptic break with logocentrism. Finally,
although recuparation
is a standard scientific practice, as it is witnessed by Popper's (1965) falsifiability,
to a deconstructionist, a "recuperator" is beyond salvation. So, Hayles (1989)
concludes: "These differences are symptomatic of the different values the two
camps place on chaos.
For deconstructionists, chaos repudiates order; for scientists, chaos makes
order possible" (1990, p. 184).

REFERENCES

Argyros, Alexander J. 1991. A Blessed Rage
of Order:
Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos. Ann Arbor: The University of
Michigan
Press.